Custom New Relic MCP Server
DevOps Engineer @ Accuris
Wrote a Model Context Protocol server for New Relic that beat the existing one on query accuracy, token cost, and speed.
Impact
- More accurate NRQL than the integration it replaced.
- Fewer tokens per request, so it cost less to run.
- Faster responses for everyday observability questions.
The problem
The New Relic integration our engineers were using was expensive and not very accurate. It wrote NRQL that often missed what people were actually asking, used a lot of tokens going back and forth, and was slow enough that people gave up and clicked through the UI instead.
The approach
I wrote a custom MCP server for New Relic from scratch, built around how our teams actually query their data. It exposed a small set of well-described tools, kept the model pointed at valid NRQL, and trimmed the context on each call so answers came back faster and cheaper.
Because it spoke MCP, it slotted right into the same setup as the rest of our tooling. It later became one of the servers behind the MCP mesh.
The impact
- More accurate NRQL than the tool it replaced.
- Fewer tokens per request, which was a steady cost saving.
- Faster responses, which is what actually got people to use it.